Hooded penitents participate in the procession of the La Paz brotherhood in Seville, Spain, on Palm Sunday, April 17, 2011. Hundreds of processions take place throughout Spain during the Easter Holy Week. Photo: AP/Miguel Angel Morenatti

Tim Hetherington (right) and Sebastian Junger (left) in Korengal Valley, Afghanistan in 2007 during the filming of their documentary,

Updated | 8:34 p.m. Tim Hetherington, renowned war photographer and director of the Oscar-nominated documentary “Restrepo,” was killed amid intense fighting in the besieged Libyan city of Misrata on Wednesday, according to news reports and the accounts of human rights organizations.

Chris Hondros, a photographer for Getty Images, was also killed in the attack, dying of severe brain trauma within a few hours, according to a statement by Getty Images co-founder and CEO Jonathan Klein. “Chris never shied away from the front line and his work in Libya was no exception,” Klein said. “Chris was a true hero in his dedication and commitment to bringing the important news and the stories of those less fortunate to us all — from far off places.”

Two other photographers working beside Hetherington and Hondros — Guy Martin and Michael Christopher Brown — were also wounded. Martin was said to have suffered severe injuries and was in critical condition in a hospital in Misrata.

Hetherington, a 40-year-old British-born New Yorker who worked as a contributing photographer for Vanity Fair, was struck by a rocket-propelled grenade in an attack by Moammar Gadhafi’s forces, Human Rights Watch said.

Hetherington was known for covering the world’s forgotten conflicts, including in Afghanistan, the subject of his film “Restrepo,” which won the Grand Jury Award at the Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award.

“Tim Hetherington was much more than a war reporter,” Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, said in a tribute on the organization’s website. “He had an extraordinary talent for documenting, in compassionate and beautiful imagery, the human stories behind the headlines.”

Hetherington is the third journalist killed in Libya since the start of the conflict there, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, which has documented more than 80 attacks on the press since February. Robert Mahoney, deputy director of the committee, said in a statement: “The Libyan conflict is proving to be an extremely dangerous story for journalists to cover.”

Along with French filmmaker Magali Charrier, Hetherington produced a disquieting short film earlier this year encompassing his 10 years of war reporting. The 19-minute video, named “Diary,” pieces together the disparate sights and sounds of Hetherington’s travels through war-torn regions — from Liberia to Afghanistan — with a haunting, almost ethereal quality. Hetherington described the film at the time as “a highly personal and experimental film that expresses the subjective experience of my work, and was made as an attempt to locate myself after ten years of reporting.”

Ten-year old Erica Miranda shows her scars after being shot three times while playing basketball outside her home in Compton, Calif. In what was believed to be a gang assault, Erica was shot in the back, knee and hip. This photo is part of a 2010 series called "Caught in the Crossfire" by Los Angeles Times photographer Barbara Davidson. The series won a Pulitzer Prize for feature photography yesterday. Photo: AP/Los Angeles Times, Barbara Davidson via the Pulitzer Prize Board

A lamb from the "BODY WORLDS of Animals" exhibition, which opened Friday, in Cologne, Germany. The exhibition features bodies of 20 animal specimens including horses, giraffes and elephants, preserved through a process called plastination. Water and fat in the deceased animal are replaced by a reactive polymer, yielding specimens that do not decay and even retain properties of the original sample. A similar exhibition featuring human bodies has been touring around the world since 1995. Photo: Gunther von Hagens, Institute for Plastination, Heidelberg, Germany, bodyworlds.com

On this day in 1866, Anne Sullivan, the teacher who helped educate Helen Keller, was born in Feeding Hills, Mass. When Keller was 19-months old, she became very ill, possibly with meningitis or scarlet fever; the brief illness left her blind and deaf with limited ability to communicate with others.

Sullivan began teaching Keller by spelling words into her palm. Initially, the finger-spelling technique meant nothing to the frustrated pupil until the ingenious teacher spelled the word “water” into one of Helen’s palms while running water over her other hand: It was then that Keller understood the concept of sign language and its relationship to the objects around her. Sullivan went on to be known as the “miracle worker,” a moniker coined by Mark Twain.Read All »

Civil War re-enactors wait Tuesday to use a restroom in Charleston, S.C., during a commemoration of the moment the first shots of the Civil War were fired 150 years ago. In 1861, General P.G.T. Beauregard open fire on Union-held Fort Sumter in South Carolina's Charleston Bay, beginning the War Between the States. Approximately 620,000 people died during the bloodiest four years in American history. Photo: AP/Alice Keeney

Kenza Drider, a French Muslim mother of four, traveled from her home in Avignon to Paris to protest the ban on full-face veils that went into effect today in France. "I'm not here to provoke, but to defend my civil liberties as a French citizen," Drider told the press outside the Notre Dame Cathedral, before being detained by police for participating in an unauthorized demonstration. Photo: Siobhán Silke

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